Gun Control, Immigration, and Tax Reform On The Agenda of 113th Congress

The new 113th U.S. Congress, will take a fresh look at a number of old, and highly contentious, issues, such as gun control, immigration, the record debt, tax reform and the farm bill.

Here’s a brief run down:

GUN CONTROL
President Barack Obama vows to crack down on gun violence in the wake of the school massacre last month in Newtown, Connecticut, the latest in a series of shooting rampages over the past decade.
According to a USA Today/Gallup Poll, 58 percent of Americans now back tougher gun laws, but 51 percent oppose Obama’s call to outlaw so-called assault weapons.
A sharply divided Congress is awaiting a broad review of gun violence headed by Vice President Joe Biden.

IMMIGRATION
Hispanic voters last year helped Obama win a second term and Democrats to increase their clout in Congress.
Republicans took notice and want to win Hispanic support in the 2014 elections. One step toward that goal would be for Republicans to become more open to immigration reform.
The big question is how far Republicans would go to provide a path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants, estimated to number up to 12 million in the United States.

SEQUESTRATION
The White House and Congress managed to cut a deal on the “fiscal cliff” by agreeing to a two-month delay to sequestration – automatic spending cuts that were set to take effect on January 1.
Obama and lawmakers now have until March 1 to reach agreement on about $85 billion in spending reductions. If they do not, they will see across-the-board ones kick in, about evenly split between military and domestic programs.

DEBT LIMIT
Obama and Congress likely have until the end of February to raise the U.S. debt limit, now at $16.4 trillion.
Failure to do so would result in an unprecedented U.S. default, a move likely to rattle financial markets worldwide.
Obama says he will refuse to allow the debt limit to become a political bargaining tool again.
But Republicans do not seem be willing to raise it without extracting major spending cuts, mostly from government programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

FARM BILL
Congress gave itself a new deadline, September 30, to complete an overdue five-year, $500 billion farm bill that withered in election-year acrimony in 2012.
The House version proposed the deepest cuts in a generation for food stamps for the poor. But fiscal conservatives want more cuts in food stamps as well as farm subsidies.
The bills produced last year by the House and Senate agriculture committees would have cut between $23 billion and $35 billion. They will dig deeper in the months ahead.

Jan is an Associated Press Award Winning Veteran television investigative journalist, now turned citizen activist for the Conservative Movement. Her Conservative voice has generated a following of over 300,000 friends and subscribers on her three Facebook pages, "Jan Morgan," "Jan Morgan Media," and "Jan On America," which led to her being selected the first Facebook Conservative Rockstar by Red White and Blue News.
During her 27 years as a television anchor and reporter, Jan's work won Associated Press awards in spot news, documentary, and best continuing coverage. Jan currently anchors a 30-minute television program in her home state. Jan has co-hosted American Akbar, an international radio blog program with Counter-Terrorism expert Gadi Adelman, is a frequent guest commentator on The Armstrong Williams Show in Washington DC, and has appeared as a guest on Fox radio in Atlanta Georgia, and Conservative Talk radio in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Arkansas and Arizona, as well as the America Family Radio in Mississippi.
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